“Remoted” – Workday 139 / Day 203 (Monday)

On October 5, 1916 my Mummu was born. She and I were sidekicks, and until junior high when life got busier, I spent most weekends with her in her four-room, second floor apartment in Fitchburg.

Structure was key to keeping things running. Mummu worked in a yarn factory and got up at 5:00 am Monday through Friday. She never drove and walked to work for a 6:00 am start. One room was cleaned each weekday after work during the commercial breaks of the soaps. Laundry was done on weekends using the washer in the big, dark, slightly scary basement and hung to dry on the clothes lines on her porch. Ironing was performed on Mondays after work in front of the soaps playing on the giant TV with the loud remote clicker.

Many Saturdays, when we weren’t watching candlepin bowling or horse racing or golf on TV, we walked downtown to shop, occasionally taking a shortcut through Laurel Hill Cemetery, which was creepy because I always had nightmares about that place. Rarely, and only if it was raining or exceptionally hot, we took a taxi back home from the taxi stand on Main Street. 

Mummu's cups and saucers
 from Finland.

When Sunday School got out at 11:00, I would get the Worcester Telegram and the Boston Globe from the variety store near church, and try to not get newsprint on me or my clothing as I trudged up Rollstone Street to her apartment. At noon, we ate dinner, often steak and always potatoes, a vegetable, bread with butter, and milk. She washed my hair in her kitchen sink, sometimes with beer or a witch hazel rinse. There were rag curls and years of crooked and/or too short bangs. Even without hair stylist training, Mummu was a pro at giving me Rave perms in the 80s which made up for all the bad haircuts of earlier years.

Mummu wore white nursing shoes to work, which were polished every Sunday (often by me) and the laces washed by hand. She always wore a skirt, blouse and white ankle socks with the nursing shoes, and I still have the gray and white striped cotton work skirt with a metal zipper she wore for years.

One summer when I was probably eight or nine, Mummu took me to the factory to show me where she worked. There were wood floors, big machines, and dust motes dancing in the light. It was a vacation week and the shop was closed for machine maintenance. She was a union rep, and once took me to a union meeting at the British American Club. I had no idea what the room of adults was discussing and was bored out of my mind. That union meeting stands out as the only time I did something with Mummu where I wished I was doing something else. 

Mummu and me, 2001. 

After 27 years at the yarn factory, it closed just a few days before Mummu was eligible for her pension, and without it, she ended up taking a job at a company that made smocks and housecoats. Mummu loved knitting, General Hospital, and watching football, basketball, baseball, horse racing, and golf on TV. Her favorite golfer was Lee Trevino. She usually had one sport on the TV and another on the radio and kept up with both games while knitting and holding a conversation. When I worked at a bank downtown after graduating college and Mummu lived downtown in the elderly highrise, we would have lunch together at her apartment.

Mummu died in 2005. She is buried in the only piece of land she ever owned -- a plot at Forest Hill Cemetery in Fitchburg. I was living in Tennessee at the time, and flew home in time to see her before she passed away. I miss her. I think about her when I make her recipes for carrot cake and merengue cookies and avoid making the complicated recipe for the raspberry truffle brownies that I loved. I think about her when I wear the black raw silk dress she bought in 1960 for her brother’s funeral that was one of the first vintage dresses in my collection. I think about her when I see any of the many sweaters she knit for me, and when I see her green and white coffee cups and saucers from Finland in my buffet. All the time, basically.

Happy birthday Mummu. Miss you.